Have You Assessed Your List of Blogging Goals Yet?

What Are Your Blogging Goals?

Without blogging goals, your blogging often stagnates. So if you don’t have any goals, create some now. I often write goals and forget to assess them, but not this year. And I’m going to do it publically. It’s ok if you don’t succeed perfectly at all of them. I did not succeed at all of them. When you assess, you may find out that you did better than you thought.

Compare Yourself with YOU!

You may know other bloggers that seem to be doing better than you are. Knowing where you are compared to where you were when you started will help you focus on what is working for you.

Seriously? You want me to share my boring goals and my failures?

I’m not kidding. I can’t breathe without having goals. A goal for breathing, really? In fact, I’m learning to walk again because I fall too much. You should see my poor face. I have goals for that, too. That’s another story.

Here’s the deal. I have two primary blogs, and I love them both. Streaming Thoughtswas my first real blog that had readers. Last month marked five years online. This month I renewed my premium theme and my Always Write domain, so for me, it’s assessment time.

Where am I going with this blogging thing?

Streaming Thoughts is my fun blog. I’m renaming it so right now it just has my name. Do you have an idea for a new name? I’m making its primary focus traveling and local events. It took me years to learn that I am a publisher, a professional blogger, even if I do it for fun. I enjoy playing around with the many aspects of blogging and not enough time focusing and becoming not good, but great. I want to change that. Why not be great?

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Blogging Goal #1 Monetize My Blog

My goal for this year was to monetize my blog. Why?

I was in a rut and I needed a new learning curve. I’d been away from blogging while I worked, and had lost the joy of making new friends, having conversations about what we were learning, and playing around with our stats. I’d been busy working and the blogging world shifted. Even writing content changed. The more I learned, the more I realized the disparity and the similarities between hobby blogging and professional blogging. And I found more hobby bloggers who had monetized their blogs. What a great way to pay for a hobby!

I wanted to help hobby bloggers like myself figure out more about this blogging experiment. So I started researching, and I’ve learned a lot in the last six months. Primarily I learned that we are all publishers. Hobby bloggers and professional bloggers, we all publish. And I decided I wanted to monetize my blog just to see if I could. And I do love to buy things for my blog.

Turns out I’m not very good at monetization, YET. At least in my first quarter. So far I’m at $0 earned specifically off my blog ads.

I felt overwhelmed with all the technical issues of a self-hosted blog. You would be amazed at all the things WordPress.com does for you now that you don’t even realize. WordPress.com kept improving as I moved away from it. When I returned after a few months’ break from blogging, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to maneuver the world of self-hosting a blog. As I discovered last week, WP gave me the option to monetize with WordPress.com when I bought my premium theme.

Who knew?

What to Do When Your Blog Breaks and You Can’t Fix It

Last November I hired a web developer, Daniel Renteria from AARC to help me design and get my self-hosted blog working efficiently. We worked out a sponsoring agreement that has operated well for me, and I hope for him. His company has also brought me some ghostwriting business on the side. When I assessed my goals, I realized gaining content writing business was one aspect of monetizing.

Kaching! $120 + countless hours of help!

I’ve learned a lot about monetizing – it’s not just ads and selling stuff! But that’s another post I’ll do later. My new friend, Maria Perez, has been casually coaching me about monetization. She’s learning too but is years ahead of me.

So, goal # 1 $0 earned on affiliates, but great connections made and it’s cooking.

Goal #2 Finish My Book Because of Blogging by April 15

All I can say to that is LOL. I haven’t worked on it except to research like crazy. It’s written, but I haven’t touched it in almost a year.

Get it back from Beta Readers on April 30. Yikes! I’m really pushing it here!

Publish by May 15 Anyone out there want to help me??? I’m drowning here.

Goal #3 Get out a weekly newsletter using Mail Chimp

That is on its way. I have published two this year and lost Yvette, one more of my favorite subscribers in addition to my sweet friend, Ralph. So I am trying to figure out how to revise my newsletters and make them more adorable. I get a lot of newsletters I don’t pay attention to, and there are a few that I do. Another post someday.

In the meantime, having a newsletter forced me to create some giveaways. Yeah! That being done I now have created two more lists for people who might want those giveaways. Now I just have to figure out where to house the giveaways. Right now they are in dropbox. That’s one of my goals for today. In the meantime, I’ve created two more lists in Mail Chimp and am learning more and more each day about the newsletter business.

Goal # 4 Write One Australia or Travel Post Every Week

Well, yes. I have been back from Australia almost three months, 12 weeks and I have just finished my 15th post which will come out on Monday on this blog. I have a gazillion left in me and my photo files. It was a trip of a lifetime – because of blogging. For those who don’t know what I mean, let me explain. I went to Australia from California BY MYSELF to visit Carol and Leanne, my two blogging friends.

Goal #5 Write One Blogging or Writing Post a Week

In twelve weeks I’ve posted 18 articles that I wrote that pertain to blogging or writing. In addition, I have been revamping my old posts that were not SEO ready. In other words, they did not have an alt tag, keyword, beginning snippet, and several times using the keyword. Along with that, I kept discovering new things that needed repair. An Amazon tag that goes to the correct account, a call to action, and resizing the pictures all needed to be changed.

I created a checklist in my Transformational Blogging Journal with all my posts listed on it as I worked through them. I have 112 posts listed as being SEO ready, and I have about 50 to go.

Goal #6 One A+ Book Review a Week

This goal gets done, but I need help. I love having your posts to air. This week I published one of Chris Graham’s posts about why we should write reviews. It was fabulous, but I had some technical difficulties. I love the fact thatChris, the Story Reading Ape is such a promoter. Always Write had over 100 visitors yesterday, which some would complain about, but I was pleased. I hope he had even more! 🙂 The article was amazing.

Goal #7 Increase Twitter to 3,000 Followers by March 31

Considering where I started, that was a pretty ambitious goal. However, I did get to 1625, an increase of 753 from Dec. 31.

Goal #8 Increase FB to 275 Followers by March 31

With the help of a post in Twitter than I pinned to the top of my Twitter feed, I reached 281, and have grown more since then. Thank you all so much!

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About The Author

I'm married, a retired educator, blogger/author, with other duties as assigned. love to travel, salted caramel TCBY yogurt and chocolate motivate me to do almost anything. Most days I make my bed. Bubble baths cure almost everything hugs cure everything else.